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DMV Turns to Vendors to Address IT Needs

At the California Department of Motor Vehicles’ virtual Vendor Day 2022, DMV and state IT leaders sought solutions to a plethora of comprehensive technology issues.

The entrance to the California DMV headquarters building.
The state department many Californians arguably know best staged its third gathering Thursday for IT companies – revealing six high-level “problem statements” for which it needs solutions.

Public- and private-sector technology officials from the California Department of Motor Vehicles, the California Department of Technology, City Innovate and LIFT spoke for nearly two hours to more than 250 attendees at the virtual Vendor Day 2022, recounting progress on initiatives like the Digital eXperience Platform (DXP), its three- to five-year replacement of core legacy systems, and revealing those six areas where they need help. (Techwire covered Vendor Day 2019 and Vendor Day 2020 as well.) Here’s where the state invited vendors to submit innovative solutions – or parts of solutions – ahead of a pitch day in April:

  • Activity-Based Costing/Modeling Process Optimization: The department wants to update a “traditional model,” per its slide deck, that uses “actual annual expenditures” and a mostly manual resource allocation process of identifying activities and cost objects – and enlarge its capacity to track activities. It seeks a “streamlined, automated, comprehensive and robust solution,” per the challenge statement, to improve division-level data aggregation for resource and activity allocations, and speed up activity modeling for cost analyses. DMV also wants to simplify how data is validated and allocations are calculated via “automated calculations built in for our Budget and Fiscal Analysis Branch.” The department’s Systems Applications and Products (SAP) solution is at end-of-life, and DMV is considering process mining tools as well as shifting from an activity-based costing (ABC) model to “more lightweight models like time-driven ABC and activity-based management.”
  • Workforce Communication Platform: More than 3,000 DMV staff lack email access and “rely on staff meetings and intranet searches for critical updates.” But the department’s existing intranet makes searches difficult. DMV wants an improved, multichannel user experience for staff, with custom, “pushed” content, reminders, links to LMS (learning management system) training offerings and smart content searches as well as better enterprisewide communication, work-related social feeds and “affinity groups.” The solution sought is described as “an enterprisewide social collaboration platform” in the challenge statement, one that uses an “Employee Communication Applications/Intranet Packaged solution” to boost experiences and productivity. DMV is considering “an internal social media-like platform,” per its slide deck, as well as “internal communications as campaigns.” A solution, it noted, could be part of human capital management – as opposed to simply integrated with HCM.
  • Service Request Tracking (Paper and Online): DMV’s master database for driver’s license/identification card and vehicle registration lacks information that would let customers track their transactions – creating hardship and resulting in 1.3 million calls a year from customers checking on transaction status. DMV seeks a “robust, streamlined and automated solution” that will track paper and online transactions and provide customers with real-time status updates. These would need to be available via customers’ online DMV accounts as well as in text and email. The department is mulling a possible integration with “an outgoing mail tracking solution,” according to the challenge statement.
  • Human Capital Management Automation: Human resources staffers are grappling with “manual and often inefficient and ineffective” processes that lack “true position control” and tracking as well as self-service options like digital forms and workflow. DMV wants to improve HR processing times via automation, syncing “many disjointed processes and systems” into a single, device-agnostic HR management system. It seeks to boost productivity, efficiency, reporting functionality and employee experience while automating intake and processing. Priorities include position control, onboarding/offboarding and appraisal tracking, according to the challenge statement. Ideas being considered include an in-house electronic recruitment solution, and bot technology to re-key data and transfer it among systems.
  • Cash Management Solutions (Smart Safe and similar technologies): Here, DMV seeks a “cash management solution” that can replace its existing need for armored car and courier services – or reduce that need – and a “streamlined solution” to its daily bank deposit and change services needs at field offices. The solution, per event slides, should be technologically advanced and offer cash management automation to modernize deposit processes and let field offices be more efficient and secure in handling cash and checks. Specifically, the department seeks a “safe repository” for cash, coins and checks; accurate and automatic banking deposits; daily reconciliation reports; automatic cash counting and a “complete audit trail with receipts.” Among the requirements, the solution must provide for electronic deposits that credit DMV accounts the next day and handle dishonored checks and counterfeit bills; and must auto-reconcile field office checks and cash deposits with DMV records.
  • Applications to resolve these challenges – and responses to the Wildcard Challenge, which calls on vendors to suggest areas where they think improvement can be made, as well as solutions – are due by 11:59 p.m. on March 3.
Theo Douglas is Assistant Managing Editor of Industry Insider — California.